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When you hear of mining companies, the next thought is usually nothing about the company being green. Well, not for
West High Yield Resources (WHY) (
TSX-V.WHY,
OTC: WHYRF,
Forum), where a focus for this company is striving to make jobs for the economy but, most importantly, seeking to save our world by reducing CO2 emissions by using the magical product of Magnesium Oxide.
Magnesium is very versatile. At West High Yield, there have been reports of 10.6 million magnesium-based tonnes based on their preliminary economic assessment and hope to make the world a better place with it.
West High Yield is a publicly-traded junior mining exploration company focused on acquiring, exploring, and developing mineral resource properties. You can find West High Yield on the TSXV under WHY.
It’s no surprise that even with the main focus being magnesium, W.H.Y.s sights are also set on gold.
At the end of 2020, West High Yield entered into a joint venture with EnviroGold Global. For this partnership, they headed to Rossland, BC, to unlock the mine’s reject rocks value stockpiled from the historic mining operations.
The Market Herald’s Brieanna McCutcheon talks with West High Yield Resources President and CEO Frank Marasco Jr. Here, we learn about the many uses of magnesium and find out what West High Yield Resources has planned for the year ahead.
TRANSCRIPTION BELOW:
SH: For all the listeners and investors who have tuned in, can you give us some background on environmental advantages with West High Yield Project?
FMJ: The environmental advantages that we have with our magnesium world-class discovery is that magnesium is probably the friendliest element on earth. And we tripped over one of the biggest greenest discoveries. It's, world-class, it's an open pit. It's very clean. There's no arsenic or no sulfides in it. And every ton that we mine, we use 99.2% of that ton. So, can you imagine having only 0.8 or 1% of waste and it's just waste rock? So, it's, we're sitting on a, it's called a one rock unit in Rossland, BC. As I said, it's an open pit. It starts right at the surface and this thing is big. So, we tripped over it. We were looking for gold and we tripped over magnesium and magnesium value is based on purity after you extract it, and our purity is 99.7% that carries very High Value
And we start at the highest purity level at 99.7 to 99.9% purity. So, it was a happy accident, just as unbelievable. We thought it was all gold. And then after we drill 38 holes there was no gold, we drill at 26 drill holes on the gold on the Midnight Claim, and we moved the bit thinking there was gold. And here we tripped over the biggest discovery of magnesium on earth and talk about green. There's nothing greener on earth in the whole world. Of course, the world is going electric vehicles, electric batteries, but we have the magnesium and the nickel that goes along with all that. So, we can lighten up all the vehicles by 33%. So, you're going to get higher mileage off the battery and of course no CO2 emissions and it's very easy to extract and separate. So, we're going to separate out the magnesium, the nickel, the silica, the cobalt, and we're left with just a little bit of rock after that. Virtually no waste at all, but we have nickel hydroxide, and we have cobalt and of course silica and the purest magnesium.
SH: Why should people invest in WHY Resources?
FMJ: That's a very good question. It is the most undervalued stock and it's the best investment that you could possibly come across in exploration, a play comes into rate across this country for everybody to go and explore and look for a discovery. We have a world-class discovery and we're already at the permit stage. So, we de-risked about 95 to 98% of it. which makes it low risk. We only got one more piece of the puzzle to complete the permit process which takes about 30 to 45 days to write. We've already gone through two government reviews. There's only one more review to go and I ran out of money. So, I'm in the middle of raising these last funds to get our mining permit. And we will have our mining permit. As an example, if I had a million dollars to date, we would have our mining permit within a six-month period, and then we can start mining.
So, it's very safe. It's very green. The whole world is going green. We have an abundance of it. We've proven up 43 years of it already, but what you have to look at is the discovery that's behind it. This is a one rock unit and it's three square miles in size or 7.5 square kilometers or three sections, one single rock. So, it's, it's a beautiful outcrop and it's a beautiful project with full infrastructure in place. So, all the roads, the electricity, the natural gas, the water is there. When we got our PEA, it had an evaluation of that time of approximately $30 a share and how they base that is they take your evaluation out of your pea, which is 1.3 billion us dollars and divided by the number of shares that you have. And that's just a rule of thumb. I'm not saying that's the exact number, but it gives you an estimate of what the value was. And it was evaluated at approximately $30 at that time. Right now, it's around $19 because of course, I had a little bit of dilution in there. So, we're now trading at 20 cents and there's a valuation we've contained 10.6 million tons of magnesium already. And we know we're going to sell it. I'm going to give you a low ball price and be very conservative about 1500 US a ton. And if you work that, Oh, that's about 17 - 18 billion US dollars already proven up. That's a fantastic amount.
Just going to say my fingers crossed, on the other government-approved permit process. That's right. And basically, all it is a rock quarry permit because it's industrial. Or we have to go through the entire process, which has taken us 14 years to go through this process three years, we were drilling for gold and then the other 11 years on Magnesium. And we're on our final stage because we've applied for the mining permits like I said earlier, and we only have one piece of the puzzle. So, if there are 14 million pieces to the puzzle, we only have one piece left to put in place. That's the finished permit process. We've already done the environmental assessment. We've already done the environmental baseline study, but there's a little bit of work that they're asking us to do, which we will complete after I raised these funds. And then we'll have our mining permits in hand.
SH: I understand the USA has issued an executive order to develop and stockpile critical resources. How does that impact WHY Resources?
FMJ: Well, that's fantastic for us because there is an executive order for critical and strategic minerals. And magnesium is one of the 35 critical and strategic minerals. So, in the United States, we're just two miles north of the Washington state border. So, it's a 5-minute drive and that gets us into Washington state. Our magnesium claim is located five minutes away. So strategically located until we just want to take that rock out. Now, we're going to make a decision whether we're going to develop it and process it in Canada or into Washington state, we haven't made that decision yet, but it'll be one of the two places that we're going to process it and get the raw material magnesium and separate out the nickel and the silica and the cobalt. And those are credits, and the magnesium is the main thing that we're going after.
And that'll be the raw material that we can share with North America because the US needs about 25 million tons of product a year. And the department of defense and the car industry would probably need about 25 million tons of year of magnesium metal ingots. Well, we couldn't produce that much. It's impossible because if we're only processing 250,000 tons of ore, and we want to move up to 1 million tons of ore a year, the maximum we could produce is with that 1 million tons ore which would produce 400,000 tons of magnesium oxide. And with that magnesium oxide, that gives us that opportunity to turn it into Metal Ingots. It starts at pharmaceutical and food-grade, so we can make supplements with it. We can make a magnesium battery with it.
SH: Now, there are endless possibilities when mining, refining, and distributing magnesium. Magnesium oxide usage has been linked to cement, supplements, wallboards, the tech world, batteries…which category are you most thrilled to be adding to and why?
FMJ: Well, we're going to start off with one plant. They're about 200 to $250 million a plant. So, we're going to start off with the magnesium oxide plant to get that raw material. And then we're going to add a clean room to it, which is a laboratory So, we can produce magnesium supplements because that's one of your highest values right there. So, we got two avenues of cashflow, magnesium oxide, and magnesium supplements. We'll start off with that, get cash flow coming in and then start looking at other plants. And we would like to look, future plants would be like I said, the magnesium ingot plant, the magnesium battery plant, the magnesium wallboard plant, the magnesium cement plant, the magnesium nitrate fertilizer plant. But this is one step at a time. If I had $2 billion, I could build all six plants, so we're going to start off with the one. And that's the magnesium oxide with a laboratory attached clean room to start producing magnesium, supplements.
SH: The environmental topic is pushed to the forefront of news outlets all over the world. Was it an easy decision to partner with EnviroGold and what are the advantages?
FMJ: EnviroGold has nothing to do with the magnesium and InviroGold is a company going around looking for past tailings and reject rock that is on your property. now where it comes to Midnight Gold Claim that we're going to start drilling for the gold. And we'll get to that question when you ask me that, but EnviroGold is going to come in and do only the reclamation of all the reject ore. There are about 250,000 tons of reject rock and tailings that are there. Yeah. And it averaged about two and a half grams to the ton. So that would generate approximately 30 million US dollars at these current prices. And they're doing all the work. So, they're spending, you know, up to about $6 million of costs and then what's leftover. We split it 50 50. So, it's a really good deal for West High Yield resources because it's going to give us a little bit of cashflow. So, there's less dilution. And that's another thing. If you look at our stocks, how much stock we have in the float, we're only talking about approximately 68 million shares. Anybody else at this level at the permit stage in our industry would range from 300 million all the way up to 1 billion shares. We're 68 million shares at the permit stage level. That's fantastic. Very little dilution.
SH: That's great. And then with the topic of EnviroGold, I wanted to ask one more question about that if that's all right. How will the proceeds within viral gold help further develop the mineral resource properties you have in Rossland BC?
FMJ: Well, that just gives us a little bit of cashflow. It's just extra cash that we need. So, don't have to go to the market and dilute the stock. So, it advances the project. No question about it. It's good. It, it keeps WHY going in the public domain, it keeps us operating covers a bunch of costs, and takes us to the next level is to build, you know, to do the blueprints on the plant, et cetera, et cetera. So, it's not much because there's not much reject rock or tailoring. There's like I said, there's only about 250,000 tons of clean up, but what it does, it reclaimed the land, there were 13 gold mines on our property. 13 of them, not one. So, they say, where you, if you're looking for gold, go where there was gold. Well, that's the infamous Roslyn gold camp. And they pulled out literally millions and millions of ounces in that corner there. And that's including the Leroy mine in the entire area, but it's, it's, it's the second biggest gold load in the history of Canada and still holds that title today.
SH: Well, it seems like a no brainer decision then to partner with EnviroGold, right?
FMJ: EnviroGold really good to do the reclamation for us. So, if we get discovery on the gold project at the midnight mine and the IXL and the, okay, the first thing they asked you to do is do the reclamation first. So, it saves us about $6 million on the reclamation part, which is very good. And then the gold where we're going to be drilling this spring for gold. It's going to be fantastic for West resources because on one end of the spectrum, we have the magnesium, the nickel, and the silica and the cobalt on the other side, you know, about on the same claims, but it's about four kilometers, five kilometers away from it is where the gold is. So, we already drilled 26 holes.
SH: And then given the big focus you have right now for magnesium extraction. Why should investors take notice of that?
FMJ: Well, because the whole world is going green now is the time to invest, in green projects. If this was coal or oil and gas, I wouldn't ask you to do that, but going green it's opened up the doors and all these markets for around the world, but we're focusing on just in Canada and the United States at this time because it's a slow process to move this up. But over time we can step outside of those jurisdictions. But talking about green, you know, the electric vehicles, the electric batteries, the cement, the cement is magical. It lasts up to 2000 years. They built a great wall in China. That's over a thousand years old out of magnesium. So, it lasts a long time compared to inland and Portland cement. And as it's setting, it absorbs CO2 emissions. And the wallboard, think about the wallboard right now. Lumber has doubled in price. So, this makes magnesium wallboard a lot cheaper and a lot safer because it's fireproof, it's smoke-proof, it's waterproof mold and mildew and termite-proof. So very, very good. And it reduces deforestation
SH: Sorry to interrupt you. I had no idea to the extent that magnesium could be used.
FMJ: It touches every single industry. That's why it's the best time. I mean, for 20 cents a share to get into this, we have the discovery just, I would advise everybody to get in and hold and watch us grow because it's a value that $19 a share right now. And I'm not saying, give me $19 a share me 10% of that. Give me that would be a dollar 90. I'm not even getting one 10th of that. So, it doesn't make sense with a world-class discovery, the cleanest product on earth, the mother's nature's friendliest product on her. What other product would you want to invest in? And we're using as I say, 99.2% of that ton. So, there's virtually no waste. It's fantastic for the investor.
SH: I want to know a little bit more about the goals that you were talking about earlier.
FMJ: So, what we're doing is we're trying to make sure I like to protect the shareholders. That's the most important things to me, one thing I want to mention, I've been there 14 years publicly, and I haven't sold one single share, and I'm not we're in this together as shareholders. So, once we get that, world-class discovery up and running and cash flowing that's for all of us together to share that wealth. So, I'm not selling any shares unless somebody knocks on our door and of course gives us all a big check and then push us out and make every shareholder rich. That's. Those are the goals that we want to do either. We develop it where somebody knocks on our door and take us out. But in the meantime, we're going to go find the motherload of gold, because we found up to six ounces to the ton on our property.
We have very, very high-grade gold. All that information is on our website. You can find it there. And it has all the first 26 holes of gold that we drill the next 22 to 24 holes that we're going to be drilling. We'll add onto those first 26 holes, but we're going to go chase the mother load. What they did in the past is they were looking for gold and they just changed the high-grade veins. We're looking for the Motherlode that comes from below the depth. So, while we're drilling for gold at the same time, we're going to finish off our permits. Now here's the thing to point out everybody that's investing in gold. There's nothing else to fall back on. So, if those other companies don't hit anything, what do you have? Nothing here. You invest with us. And you're investing in gold with us. Let's say I hit big. That's fantastic, but let's say I don't hit anything. We have the magnesium, the nickel, and the silica at the back, everything up. So, you don't lose. You have something to back up your investment. And that's why this is a great potential and a great investment for all people that want to get into the green space and gold at the same time. Because we have gold and silver there too. So, it's very, very good for anybody to get into our stock. Uninvited.
Yeah. Sorry. I'd like to invite everybody in. And the key is to come into this private placement that we got going right now because the private placement gets us across the finish line. The meal ticket is that permit and that's the key. And that's de-risking it 100%. And going through that process and we have a world-class discovery, that's three sections in size. And all we touched was the size of our baby fingernail in comparison to what's there. But, on that fingernail, we've all the facts and science for 43 years of mining. 1 million tons a year.
SH: Sounds like a well thought out plan for WHY Yield Resources then?
FMJ: Absolutely. It's a great project. We're in Canada, we're in a Safe Haven. We're in the Brown. We have the full infrastructure in place. Just the infrastructure alone is a billion dollars. If you had to bring it all in, it's in the middle of our property, we don't have to bring it in it's there. So that has value in itself. So, it's a fantastic project. We find that it's quite a great investment because we de-risk it so much. Now we're going back to the gold. Well, we're waiting for our permits.
For more information, visit www.whyresources.com
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.